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Thursday, August 27, 2009

BBA Challenge #12: English Muffins

Here's the latest recipe in the BBA Challenge: English Muffins. These were a standard, enriched dough, quick and easy to make. Different from most breads, these bake in a skillet, then finish up in the oven. I left mine in the skillet a little too long and ended up with some rather dark tops and bottoms, but other than that they were... just okay. I'm not a super English Muffin connoisseur, but these didn't really seem like anything special to me or to Erik. We did enjoy them, however. The first night I made Eggs Benedict, and well, even mediocre bread is delicious when topped with ham and egg and smothered with hollandaise sauce. The second night we used them as hamburger buns. I didn't even eat one plain, but did enjoy them. Even so, if I'm going to make bread I'll put my energy into recipes I've enjoyed more. To be fair, I should probably try the recipe again. To be honest, I probably won't. :>

1 comment:

Well, the cool weather today inspired me to change our menu to a hearty soup. Of course, if I make clam chowder, I have to make bread.

I jumped ahead in BBA and made the Casatiello. I used smoked sausage and swiss cheese. Oh, and I noticed the author's suggestion to use buttermilk so I figured it was safe to substitute kefir. I used my kitchen-aid for almost the entire process. I baked it in a casserole, using the convection feature on my oven so I reduced the temperature to 310*F for the first 20 minutes. When I checked it at the end of that, it seemed to be browning too quickly so I reduced the temp further to 300*F for the remaining 20 minutes.

This bread was flavorful, rich and savory. I will definitely make this again and again. We can try different meat/cheese combos, too.

Now, if I could just get that sourdough going! I'm not having any obvious success. but I'll keep on trying.